"The Nazi movement was not a uniquely German event; it is a uniquely human event. And such a dark movement remains in our hardened hearts to this day. When human beings, for whatever reason and rationale, decide that it is necessary and expedient to cast aside their moral principles and their conscience, and in the pain of their humanity make themselves into beasts, then the will to power and its madness is unleashed upon them. No one, no people, is safe from this awful tragedy." Jesse

27 January 2015

Wall Street As a Negative Economic Force: Looting Will Continue Until Exhaustion or Collapse

“My hunch is that no one talks about the birth and death rates of American business because Wall Street and the White House, no matter which party occupies the latter, are two gigantic institutions of persuasion. The White House needs to keep you in the game because their political party needs your vote. Wall Street needs the stock market to boom, even if that boom is fueled by illusion.”

As Pam and Russ Martens note in their recent article below, "Wall Street’s overarching function today is that of an institutionalized wealth transfer mechanism, propped up by compromised regulators and a dysfunctional Congress."

This is a terrific article, right on point, getting the bigger picture that almost all economic writers are missing, or failing to state in a clear and direct manner without mincing words. The moneyed interests are not beneficent wealth creators doing God's work and creating jobs and value. These are more like white collar criminals who are able to bend the law to their will, acting like parasites on the real economy.

THEY are 'too big to fail,' and you are 'too little to matter,' except as a convenient source of their income.

The financial sector is a utility function in a healthy, sustainable, and productive economy. But in our misdirected mania to establish and maintain the global dollar supremacy in our pride and power, we have turned a utility function into a top priority and the central focus of the economy, to our own ultimate misfortune.

Our society is out of balance and distorted as a result. Corporations take precedence over people, and money directs the course of public policy and foreign entanglements, to its own ends. And the people are left to suffer.

The decline and stagnation of America coincides with the rise of an outsized and increasingly corrupt financial sector, that is misdirecting resources and gaming the savings and efforts of the great mass of the people, reallocating money to it own wasteful purposes.

As such, the Fed is not only being wasteful with their QE programs, they are actually being counterproductive by propping up a corrupt and harmful financial system that is a major impediment to economic recovery and progress. This is the lesson of the lost decades of Japan, and we are not only repeating them here, but are strongly influencing and urging their adoption in Europe.

And shame on the liberal economists, who will promote stimulus of any sort in their ideological fervor, and cheerlead the results along with the White House, without being mindful that stimulus in itself is not a good thing, if it stimulates the wrong things. QE is not an effective means of stimulus for the real economy, but it is a windfall and a sinecure for the financial sector and the one percent.

People and the real economy need jobs and higher real wages, but not increasingly powerful Banks for which they are prey. Aggregate demand will stimulate jobs and wages, but not government handouts to the wealthy, who will chase hot money scams and monopolies before sharing their wealth with employees and productive investments.

The privileged and fortunate have an age old model of feudalism in mind: lords and serfs. And if the financial elite have their way, the looting, surveillance, and repression will continue, until exhaustion or collapse.

Their greed knows no bounds, and is never satisfied. Power and pride have their own imperatives: better to be a lord in a kind of hell, than just another servant, even in heaven.

History has shown, again and again, how pernicious the corruption can become once the abuse of power takes root in a system. And how hard it finally falls.

People cannot work harder and save faster than the financiers and their politicians can steal their capital, misdirecting it into scams, frivolous 'innovations,' unjust taxes and subsidies, and ultimately into their own financial machine where it enables even more scams, corruption, and malinvestments.

And reform cannot happen in a system where the moneyed interests vet the presidential candidates in advance, for whom they will allow you the privilege of voting, whipped up into an enthusiasm by the emotional directed messages of their corporate media. Vote for Red! No, you fool, vote for Blue!

The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustainable recovery.

Evidence Grows Showing Wall Street as a Negative Economic Force

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens

January 27, 2015

Wall Street’s overarching function today is that of an institutionalized wealth transfer mechanism, propped up by compromised regulators and a dysfunctional Congress. As the PBS program Frontline reported in 2013, if your work career spans 50 years and you receive the historic return of 7 percent on stocks in your 401(k) plan, the 2 percent typical fee charged by Wall Street mutual funds will gobble up almost two-thirds of your account.

The Frontline program was called The Retirement Gamble. Wall Street On Parade checked the math and found this was not a gamble but a certainty: 'under a 2 percent 401(k) fee structure, almost two-thirds of your working life will go toward paying obscene compensation to Wall Street; a little over one-third will benefit your family – and that’s before paying taxes on withdrawals to Uncle Sam.'"

This is a very short excerpt from a larger and more data packed article you may read for free here.

Le Propriétaire

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Need Little - Want Less - Love More

The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustainable recovery.

"In the Incarnation the whole human race recovers the dignity of the image of God. Thereafter, any attack even on the least of men is an attack on Christ, who took on the form of man, and in his own Person restored the image of God in all. Through our relationship with the Incarnation, we recover our true humanity, and at the same time are delivered from that perverse individualism which is the consequence of sin, and recover our solidarity with all mankind." Dietrich Bonhoeffer

LET US COMMEND OUR PAST TO HIS ABUNDANT FORGIVENESS, AND TRUST OUR FUTURE TO HIS KINDNESS AND TENDER MERCY. LET US PERMIT OURSELVES TO BE FASHIONED ACCORDING TO HIS WILL, NOT FOR HIS SAKE, BUT FOR OURS. REMEMBER TO FEED THE LEAST OF HIS CREATURES, THE BIRDS AND ANIMALS. AND THE HEARTS OF THOSE YOU MEET, WITH A KIND WORD AND A SMILE.

"A credibility trap is when the managerial functions of a society have been sufficiently compromised by corruption so that the leadership cannot reform, or even honestly address, the problems of that system without implicating a broad swath of the powerful, including themselves.

The moneyed interests and their aspirants tolerate the corruption because they have profited from it, and would like to continue to do so. Discipline is maintained by various forms of soft financial rewards and career and social coercion."

These are personal observations about the economy and the markets. In providing information, I hope this allows you to make your own decisions in an informed manner, even if it is from learning by my mistakes, which are many. As a standing policy I never provide individual investment advice to anyone. I will only occasionally disclose my personal positions for purposes of illustration. Understand that my own circumstances could differ greatly from your own, and therefore what is suitable for me may not be suitable for you. My comments are intended to be reflection on general macro financial and economic events and trends.